15 Ways Our World Could Be Destroyed

From nuclear devastation from angry politicians to alien invasions coming out of the sky to take all our stuff, we count 15 of the deadliest, still-possible ways the world may end.

15 – Solar Storm

Part of an 11-year cycle building towards a “solar max”, in which the Sun emits high doses of electromagnetic radiation and magnetic-infused bubbles of gas that can reach Earth in seconds

When it hits, it knocks power grids out for hundreds of millions of people, cost trillions of dollars to fix, halt communication and international trade for years and end up killing millions of people

We’ve already seen this happen a couple of times in the last two centuries – in 1989 power was knocked out for all of Quebec, Canada

A massive solar storm could have dire repercussions for the people of Earth – and the scariest part is we’d have almost no warning

14 – Planetary Heartburn

Deep in our vast ocean’s there exist gas-storing structures known as clathrates which, over time, build mass quantities of greenhouse gas like methane

Supposing global warming continued as we’ve seen over the years, these clathrates would turn into explosive time-bombs that build up too much gas, erupt and spray over 400 gigatons of greenhouse into our atmosphere

It would be the Earth equivalent of heartburn and set us on a path of destruction from which there is no return

13 – Nuclear War

This is the one I personally believe could very well happen – all it takes is one madman to fire off a nuke at another nuclear-equipped country and we’re looking at a war which will devastate the surface of our planet and obliterate large chunks of the human race, providing the deterrence theory fails

Today we’re looking at North Korea’s big offensive talk, to Iran’s supposed secret nuclear arsenal, increased nuclear stockpiles in China, Pakistan, India and stalled negotiations to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons in the US and Russia

It’s no wonder the Doomsday Clock which counts down to humanities destruction has been pushed up to 5 minutes to midnight in 2014

12 – Asteroid/Meteor Impact

Many theories suggest it was a giant meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, and the same might be true for us one day

It’s generally agreed that a meteor one mile across would wipe out our civilisation of Earth and it’s though the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor six miles across

To make matters worse, if a rock that size were seen hurtling towards earth, it would be impossible to destroy with a nuclear weapon; in fact, we’d need a nuke a billion times more powerful than anything we’ve so far created

11 – Super Volcano

We only have around 500 volcanoes in the world, but we know of 4 “super” volcanoes one of which is Yellowstone in America, Lake Toba in Indonesia, Taupo in New Zealand and Aira Caldera, Japan

What makes them so different? Well, the explosion from any of these would be thousands times more powerful than any other volcano and the devastation it would unleash – 2000 million tons of sulphuric acid, basically a nuclear winter with dust and debris blocking out the sun